Tag Archives: where are the tax returns

Mitt Romney’s acceptance speech: NINE issues he decided he wouldn’t talk about

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Long on biography but short on policy.

Think Progress lists 9 items Romney either didn’t bring up — or that were mentioned in passing — in his acceptance speech last night. “[F]or a candidate who chose Paul Ryan as his running mate to signal a willingness to take on big challenges, Romney spent precious few — if any — words discussing some of the country’s most pressing problems and even less time explaining how a Romney/Ryan administration would solve them:”

  1. – 0 mentions of Financial Reform: Even as millions of Americans struggle with the effects of the Great Recession caused by Wall Street malfeasance and scores of others continue to deal with the fallout of the foreclosure fraud scandal, Romney has said that he will repeal the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law, but has yet to detail what, if anything, he would put in its place.
  2. — 0 mentions of Climate Change: “President Obama promised to begin to slow the rise of the oceans and heal the planet,” Romney said to loud laughter. It’s too bad that he and most of the GOP delegates don’t believe in the very real threat of global warming.
  3. – 0 mentions of Immigration: “We are a nation of immigrants,” Romney said, without explaining how he would help the 12 million undocumented immigrants in the United States. Romney has not said if he would rescind Obama’s temporary directive permitting young undocumented immigrants to work in the country, though his advisers have suggested that he would.
  4. – 0 mentions of Romneycare: The convention speakers didn’t tackle Romney’s greatest accomplishment as governor, the enactment of universal health care coverage in Massachusetts. Romney promised to repeal Obamacare, but did not say what he would replace it with.
  5. – 0 mentions of Afghanistan or Syria: Romney did not mention how he planned to address the nation’s largest ongoing wars or one of the most important ongoing humanitarian crises on Earth. This may be because the Romney campaign has been unable to meaningfully distinguish its policies from those of the Obama administration on either of these crucial issues.
  6. – 0 mentions of Social Security: Romney’s running mate, Paul Ryan, has proposed Social Security privatization schemes that would have cost retirees dearly if they had been in place during the financial crisis.
  7. – 0 mentions of Veterans: Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time Romney has ignored veterans issues. After he spoke to the Veterans of Foreign Wars last month, veteran advocates said they were “still waiting for Romney to spell out how he would do better than his opponent.” “We haven’t … heard any specific plans yet from Governor Romney or his campaign,” said Bob Wallace, executive director at the Washington office of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, echoing the sentiment of many advocates.”
  8. – 1 mention of Medicare: Romney criticized Obama for cutting $716 billion cuts from Medicare — reductions that are also included in Paul Ryan’s budget. But did not explain what his own controversial reforms. Under Romney’s “premium support” plan, seniors would have to spend significantly more for health care.
  9. – 1 mention of Housing: Romney did say, “when the realtor told you that to sell your house you’d have to take a big loss” — but that’s all. The Federal Reserve bank of New York anticipates that millions of Americans will face foreclosure this year and next, but Romney has yet to release a housing plan, beyond telling homeowners in foreclosure-battered Las Vegas “don’t try and stop the foreclosure process,” just “let it run its course and hit the bottom.”

Mitt Romney is a firm believer in keeping secrets, which includes his policy plans. Romney has restricted voters to a ‘need to know’ access, meaning they don’t need to know until after they vote for him.

Romney on Swiss bank accounts: I’m not going to manipulate my life by closing accounts

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“But, I mean, I did live my life. And I expect by virtue of disclosing all these things, people can take a look at it and see whether that’s something they’re comfortable with or not. I’m not going to try and hide who I am and try and manipulate my life to try and avoid the truth.” — Mitt Romney, responding to Fox News host Chris Wallace’s line of questioning on Romney’s Swiss bank accounts.

Here’s the funny part: we CAN’T “take a look” at anything but the one year — that’s his full “disclosure.” And he says we’ll get no more. But he’s right about one thing: we can decide if we’re comfortable with this or not.

Mitt Romney scored huge tax benefits in 2010 using an “active” status at Bain Capital

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DID YOU KNOW that while Mitt Romney tells us he isn’t involved with Bain Capital and his ‘blind trust’ investments there, he tells the IRS that he’s an active participant. Why? Because you get more money from the IRS with an active, rather than passive, investment status:

The distinction is valuable, for the IRS treats passive and active income and losses differently. If a passive investment loses money, the taxpayer can only write off that loss if passive gains have also been made. But active losses can be written off at a 35 percent rate and deducted from the taxpayer’s ordinary income. In other words, a taxpayer wants active losses, not passive losses. So by describing many of his investments as active, Romney saves himself millions of dollars in taxes.

With those active investments, he is also securing a tax break few Americans enjoy: When he wins, he’s paying a 15 percent rate on the gain. When he loses, he’s writing it off at 35 percent, meaning that tax policy is subsidizing Romney’s risk in his Bain investments.

In other words, Romney didn’t build that, at least not without taxpayer backing.

So while Romney tells us he retroactively retired from Bain in 1999 (to avoid criticism about layoffs and other controversies) – and as Huffington Post notes when “tax experts charged that he benefited from legally dubious tax avoidance strategies employed by Bain, his campaign noted that the investments are kept in a blind trust completely out of his control” — we now learn that as recently as 2010 he was telling the IRS that he was actively involved so that he can grab the better tax rates on investment wins and losses.

That doesn’t sound like a retirement or a “blind” trust. Unbelievably, this man will be nominated as the GOP’s presidential candidate this week, and you have to ask: who is he lying to — the American public or the IRS?

And where are the rest of his tax returns?

The Bain Files: will 954 pages of Bain’s financial documents reveal anything?

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Joe. My. God. explains what this is about: 

Gawker has posted 954 pages of previously unseen and labyrinthine Bain financial documents which they say may reveal proof of Mitt Romney’s attempt to cloak his massive holdings in tax-proof domestic and offshore accounts.

Bain isn’t a company so much as an intricate suite of steadily proliferating inter-related holding companies and limited partnerships, some based in Delaware and others in the Cayman Islands, Luxembourg, and elsewhere, designed to collectively house roughly $66 billion in wealth in its many crevices and chambers. When Romney left in 1999, he and his wife retained significant investments in many of those Bain vehicles—he claims they are “passive investments” and that they are managed in a blind trust (though the trustee isn’t blind enough to meet federal standards of independence). But aside from disparate snippets of information contained in his federal and Massachusetts financial disclosure forms, his 2010 tax returns, and SEC filings, the nature of those investments has been obfuscated by design.

Gawker says that the documents are so deliberately vague and complex that they cannot begin to decipher what they actually say. They are asking forensic accountants and their readers to dig in.

Bain Documents: Romney Offshore Investments Used ‘Blockers’ To Avoid Taxes – ABC News (via: sarahlee310)

The private equity firm founded by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney made use of arcane techniques in several of its Cayman Islands-based funds to avoid U.S. taxes, according to a trove of Bain Capital’s private audit and finance records made public on the website Gawker today.

The audited financial statements of one of the Cayman Islands funds make note of the use of “blocker” entities, which are used to help retirement accounts and nonprofit entities avoid some taxes. Financial statements for another fund note that it “intends to conduct its operations so it will … not be subject to United States federal income or withholding tax …”

Those details emerge on the statements of two funds in which Romney still holds a sizeable investment, according to the financial disclosure statements he filed when he announced his bid for president.

The publication of the Bain Documents on the Gawker website could rekindle debate about Romney’s role at the company, and specifically about Bain’s decision to domicile many of its funds in offshore locations known as tax havens.

Fortune‘s Dan Primack calls the documents “worthless” and says he had them months ago…

Alex Seitz-Wald homes in on one discovery:

[O]ne immediate revelation is that Sankaty fund, based in Delaware for tax purposes, lent over $3 million to Las Vegas Sands, the casino company owned by Adelson. The fund made two loans of $2.4 million and $600,000 in 2009 to the Sands. Romney’s IRA held between $250,000 and $500,000 in the partnership, and made $50,000 and $100,000 from it in 2011. Adelson has become the largest donor to the Republican Party and conservative outside groups, dropping at least $70 million. 

Why won’t Mitt Romney release his tax returns: the “voter fraud” theory

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MS Bellows Jr. at the Guardian posits another ‘why Romney won’t release his tax returns’ theory: releasing them will prove he committed voter fraud:

“But the Romneys, arbitrarily, refuse to disclose a copy of the returns they filed in 2010 or 2009 (for tax years 2009 and 2008) – which, perhaps not coincidentally, bracket the time period when Romney allegedly committed fraud by voting in Massachusetts when he actually resided in California. So here’s the question: did Romney put his son’s basement’s address on the returns he filed in 2009 and 2010? Or did he truthfully use his real (non-Massachusetts) address, thus implicating himself in voter fraud?”

I’ll bet money that he doesn’t want to release his returns because of numerous, multiple reasons — and this could well be one of them.

Fun fact: there are only two things that Mitt Romney considers politically “suicidal”

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1) Giving the American people a look at his tax returns.

2) Giving the American people specifics about his policies.

Mitt Romney 2012: just take his word for it!

Romney tells us (trust him!) he paid 13% in taxes—thinks he deserves a cookie now

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“…But I did go back and look at my taxes and over the past 10 years I never paid less than 13 percent. I think the most recent year is 13.6 or something like that. So I paid taxes every single year. Harry Reid’s charge is totally false. I’m sure waiting for Harry to put up who it was that told him what he says they told him. I don’t believe it for a minute, by the way. But every year I’ve paid at least 13 percent and if you add in addition the amount that goes to charity, why the number gets well above 20 percent.” – Mitt Romney

First of all, even if our tax code allows the definition, since when is REQUIRED TITHING to your church the same as contributing to “charity”? Particularly when the Mormon Church rakes in $7 BILLION A YEAR from “charitable contributions” (aka: required tithing) and uses part of those contributions to build shopping malls and to fund political campaigns. Also, why am I paying at least twice as much in federal taxes on my paltry income than Romney is — a guy who’s worth a quarter billion dollars? And Team Romney-Ryan want to implement more tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires, so they’ll pay even less while we’ll pay even more. Does that plan sound good to you?

Some reactions to Romney’s remarks:

Ezra Klein: “To which the obvious answer is: Well, then, why won’t you prove it?“

Andrew Sullivan: “Romney refusing to release his returns isn’t a sign of strength. It’s a sign of stupidity.”

The Wire creator David Simon marvels at Romney’s nerve in “declaiming proudly” that he paid at least 13% taxes every year: “Am I supposed to congratulate this man? Thank him for his good citizenship? Compliment him for being clever enough to arm himself with enough tax lawyers so that he could legally minimize his obligations? Thirteen percent. The last time I paid taxes at that rate, I believe I might still have been in college…. I can’t get over the absurdity of this moment, honestly:  Hey, I never paid less than thirteen percent.  I swear.  And no, you can’t examine my tax returns in any more detail.  But I promise you all, my fellow American citizens, I never once slipped to single digits.  I’m just not that kind of guy.”

Rod Dreher piles on: “What Simon is getting at is Romney is an extremely rich man who pays significantly less of a percentage of his income in taxes than millions of people who make far less than he does, and he still seems to think he deserves a cookie. I’m sick and tired of him and his wife whining about how people are so mean to them about their taxes.”

Robert Reich: “Since when are charitable contributions added to income taxes when judging whether someone has paid his fair share? More to the point, Romney admits to an income of over $20 million a year for the last several decades. Which makes his 13 percent — or even 20 percent — violate the principle of equal sacrifice that lies at the core of our notion of tax fairness. 

“Even Adam Smith, the 18th century guru of free-market conservatives, saw the wisdom of a graduated tax embodying the principle of equal sacrifice. “The rich should contribute to the public expense,” he wrote, “not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more in proportion.”

“Equal sacrifice means that in paying taxes people ought to feel about the same degree of pain regardless of whether they’re wealthy or poor. Logically, this means someone earning $20 million a year should pay a much larger proportion of his income in taxes than someone earning $200,000, who in turn should pay a larger proportion than someone earning $50,000.

“But Romney’s alleged 13 percent tax rate is lower than that of most middle class Americans who earn a tiny fraction of what he earns. 

“At a time when poverty is increasing, when public parks and public libraries are being closed and when public schools are shrinking their offerings and their hours, when the nation’s debt is immense, and when the 400 richest Americans have more wealth than the bottom 150 million of us put together — Romney’s 13 percent is shameful.”

Romney-Ryan’s very bad Thursday: Mitt’s tax returns and Ryan’s Medicare plan

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“We’ll believe it when we see it. Until Mitt Romney releases his tax returns, Americans will continue to wonder what he’s hiding.” -- Harry Reid, clearly amused by Mitt Romney’s revelation earlier in the day…

Buzzfeed reports that Mitt Romney went “off-script” yesterday during a press conference at the Greer, S.C. airport, during which he planned to wonk-out for reporters — with a white board, marker, and eraser — and explain his Medicare program. Instead, this happened:

…a reporter asked him whether he had reviewed his tax returns to find out how much he’d paid, as he promised ABC News he would when he was in Israel. Apparently frustrated with the distraction from his Medicare message, Romney bristled at the question, calling it “small-minded” — and then spontaneously offered new details on his personal finances.

“I did got back and look at my taxes and over the past 10 years, I never paid less than 13 percent,” he said. “I think the most recent years is 13.6 percent or something like that. So I paid taxes every single year. Harry Reid’s charge is totally false. I’m sure waiting for Harry to put up who it was that told him what he says they told him. I don’t believe it for a minute, by the way.”

See? I’ll bet that if President Obama said things and wanted Republicans to just take his word for it about the things, that would be good enough for the GOP — so why isn’t that good enough for Harry Reid and Democrats!?

Buzzfeed continues with Master Paul Ryan, who was supposed to flash his foreign diplomacy bona fides by talking about China:

Paul Ryan bought a reporter a hot dog for his birthday and answered an off-message question. And so the campaign, yet again, lost control of its story, with Romney making news on his personal tax returns, and Ryan offering a complex defense of his views on Medicare. And questions about the wisdom of picking a policy visionary for a running mate and then rejecting the specifics of his detailed vision grew deeper. [... Moody asked] Ryan to explain why he had included $716 billion in cuts to planned Medicare spending in his famous budget plan, if he now opposes it. Ryan’s answer, couched in the process-heavy language of Capitol Hill, was that it wasn’t his fault the cuts had already been priced into the “baseline” and that while relying on them, he had also opposed them when they passed as part of ObamaCare. Forget China: Medicare drove the day in Ohio.

Maybe in Ohio, but by that evening Think Progress noted that ABC, NBC, and CBS Evening News all led with Romney’s tax returns.

Go Romney! Where are the tax returns? This election could be a referendum on what percentage of income you’ve paid for 10 years, compared to the rest of us — and how maybe, possibly, potentially we might think those tax laws are unfair and want to change them.

John McCain’s Freudian Slip: “I am absolutely confident that [Romney] did not pay taxes.”

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…

Video above begins here:

Jon Ralston: Did you ask your team if Mitt Romney did not pay taxes?

McCain: I am absolutely confident that he did not pay taxes. …I mean that he did pay, excuse me, that he did pay taxes.

Notice McCain didn’t answer Ralston’s question. But McCain’s answer is revealing anyway because he’d just finished explaining that in 2008 he had a team who reviewed the tax returns so McCain himself never saw anyone’s returns. Regardless, he’s “confident” Romney did not did pay taxes.

h/t addictinginfo.org

Mitt Romney’s laugh is his tell

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“For Mitt Romney, it’s the laugh. I’m sure that at times Romney laughs with genuine mirth, but you know the laugh I’m talking about. It’s the one he delivers when he gets asked a question he doesn’t want to answer, or is confronted with a demand to explain a flip-flop or a lie. It’s the phoniest laugh in the world, the one New York Times reporter Ashley Parker wrote ‘sounds like someone stating the sounds of laughter, a staccato Ha. Ha. Ha.‘ Everything Mitt Romney is as a candidate is distilled within that laugh — his insincerity, his ambition, his awkwardness, and above all his fear. When Mitt laughs that way, he is not amused. He is terrified. Because he knows that what he’s saying is utter baloney, and he knows that we know it.” — Paul Waldman

On Medicare: Romney and Ryan are “very similar” and “very different”

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Steve Benen reports on the impressive clarity of Team Romney-Ryan on Medicare:

Mitt Romney, yesterday, asked about Paul Ryan’s Medicare plan: “[M]y plan for Medicare, it’s very similar to his plan for Medicare.”

Romney surrogate John Sununu, this morning, asked about the similarities in Romney’s Medicare plan to Paul Ryan’s policy: “But it’s very different.”

I’m glad we got this straightened out. Here I thought the Romney-Ryan campaign might have a muddled message on the issue they’ve put at the center of the 2012 presidential race.

To help clarify matters, Romney’s policy director, Lanhee Chen, told TPM, “Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan have always been fully committed to repealing Obamacare, ending President Obama’s $716 billion raid on Medicare and tackling the serious fiscal challenges our country faces.”

Except, as even the most ignorant policy directors surely know, every penny of savings Obama found in Medicare has been included in Paul Ryan’s budget, which Romney endorsed. (And if they repeal Obamacare, they’ll take away benefits for seniors.)

Andrew Sullivan reviews Romney’s new Medicare ad:

…$716 billion is how much Obamacare cuts from Medicare spending – but the ad implies this is some kind of cut to Medicare recipient’s benefits; it’s not. Pema Levy explains: Cuts made in the Affordable Care Act are to future growth and come from reimbursement reductions to hospitals, Medicaid prescription drugs and private insurance plans under Medicare Advantage. Ryan’s cuts come from shifting Medicare from its current form to subsidies for seniors to buy care themselves.

The Ryan plan also makes the same cuts, only by instituting a voucher program, all of which Romney is trying to murky-up by saying he’ll put that $716 billion “back”. The bottom line is they’re spinning another whopper here, just like in the welfare ads.

If the Romney campaign didn’t spin whoppers daily, they’d have nothing to deflect attention away from his business “experience” with Bain Capital and the 2002 Olympics, or why he won’t release his tax returns like every other presidential candidate. And Romney would also have to actually talk about how different his vision for America is from President Obama’s.

Mitt Romney is not a fan of metaphor: GOP outrageous outrage / distraction of the day

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When Joe Biden tells a crowd that Romney’s going to “put y’all back in chains” over banking regulation, I think everyone “gets” the metaphor. But Willard Romney took that pretty personally — almost as if putting people in chains was a secret fantasy he’d been called out on.

The quote: “Look at what they value and look at their budget, and what they’re proposing. Romney wants to let the — he said in the first 100 days, he’s going to let the big banks once again write their own rules. Unchain Wall Street. They’re going to put y’all back in chains.” — VP Joe Biden, yesterday in Virginia 

Raw Story: A furious Romney fired back at a rally in Ohio, accusing Obama, who ran in 2008 vowing to heal political divides, of trying to “smash America apart” to cobble together a 51 percent majority to win a second term. “This is what an angry and desperate presidency looks like,” he said, in the most charged exchanges of the campaign so far. “Mr President, take your campaign of division and anger and hate back to Chicago and let us get about rebuilding and reuniting America,” the Republican candidate said. 

[...] “Governor Romney’s comments tonight seemed unhinged and particularly strange coming at a time when he’s pouring tens of millions of dollars into negative ads that are demonstrably false,” Obama spokesman Ben LaBolt said.

Because Romney became unhinged over Biden’s metaphor, the news media must either give Mitt a belly rub or chase down an explanation:

USA Today: Stephanie Cutter, Obama’s deputy campaign manager, said Biden was referencing comments by leading Republicans who say they support “unshackling” the private sector from regulation. “The Vice President has often used a similar metaphor to describe the need to ‘unshackle’ the middle class,” Cutter said. “Today’s comments were a derivative of those remarks, describing the devastating impact letting Wall Street write its own rules again would have on middle class families.” Earlier this year, Biden said, “the last time we unshackled Wall Street, America’s middle class was shackled.”

As if we didn’t already know that.

More importantly: that took some heat off Romney’s tax returns for one day at least, didn’t it?

Billionaire, mega-donor Sheldon Adelson is loading up Paul Ryan’s briefcase tonight in Las Vegas

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Buzzfeed reports “As of Tuesday morning, reporters would not be permitted to cover Ryan’s fundraiser with billionaire mega-donor Sheldon Adelson at The Venetian in Las Vegas tonight. The campaign’s agreement with the press is that events not at private residences are to be open to reporters. The campaign has also kept reporters from events where Romney does not deliver formal remarks. Ryan aides would not comment on the change on the record. Ryan held a fundraiser in Denver on Monday that was closed press because it was at a private home. [...] A Romney aide told reporters that the event in Las Vegas is not a fundraiser but a “finance event,” and therefore closed to reporters. The aide would not say what the distinction is between the two, declining to say whether the campaign is collecting checks at the event.”

Just like Mitt and his tax returns, the billionaires who want to buy Romney the White House prefer their privacy when making political investments.

UPDATE: Romney’s campaign announces it raised $7.4 million online in 3 days after announcing Paul Ryan pick – @thehill http://t.co/uv9ZJqUI (via: thepoliticalfreakshow)

Quick donate to Pres. Obama: $5, $10, $15… and Register to vote.

Mitt Romney has decided that talking about his business experience is now ‘gutter politics’

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“Mr. President, take your campaign out of the gutter. Let’s talk about the real issues that America faces.” — Mitt Romney, at a Wisconsin rally on Sunday night.

Suddenly talking about Mitt’s vast “business experience”, his actual history with Bain Capital, and his lack of tax returns (and how much federal tax he actually paid as compared to everyone else) is “gutter politics.” Uh huh.